She experienced the world the way he might have, if his skull had not been nearly chopped in half by an axe: Dark, fuzzy images moving back and forth in front of his face, in and out of his perspective, through eyes that could neither move nor recognize.
She explored his weakness, his confusion. Limbs that would not move, mouth that could not speak. Blood pouring relentlessly down the back of his throat so that he seized every breath with a painful, bubbling jerk.
Whir of a transport subparking on the console. Hard-soled shoes clicking down the walkway.
Rulita's head snapped up and she disengaged, fading back into the crowd of gawkers who would read about it later on DeathBlog and tell all their friends, "I saw him die, too. But I didn't know it felt like that."
The man's head was a mass of blood-clotted hair. His arms and legs flopped convulsively. Brain fluid spilled on the walkway and mixed with blood, following the crack between the silvery segments of the walkway and pouring off the edge into nothing. Thick, like chocolate milk coming off the lip of a pitcher. Somewhere far below, she imagined a pedestrian wiping his shoulder in confusion, the window of a transport splattered with red slop.
Rulita licked her lips. The detective was looking right at her, frowning in recognition. The same fat bastard had picked her out the last time and chased her all of ten steps before giving up. He already knew he couldn't hang anything on her. Why would he waste his time harassing her, when there was an axe-wielding killer on the loose? She had no idea. She turned and fled again.
The thin one followed this time, tracking her for ten blocks before she jumped into a Mach2 elevator shaft and lost him.
The elevator was on its way down at the time, or the same detectives might have been scraping her remains off the top of the car. As it was, Erol's quadroshank net stopped her fall, ripping the skin on her right shoulder to shreds, and she spent the next three minutes using a couple of underpowered electromagnets to drag herself up to the nearest outlet and pry the safety doors open.
A crowd of startled passengers expecting the elevator car stared horrified as she squeezed through the narrowest possible opening and staggered to the nearest public transport. One man recognized the splice on her right hand and started a cheer that others in the crowd took up.
"DeathBlog! DeathBlog!"
She did not acknowledge their applause. The spotlight was reserved for the victims, not the reporter.
***
"That quadroshank was not designed for your own personal necrosurfs, Lita." Erol's blue eye was twitching, he was so angry. The brown one glared at her injured shoulder. He jerked the minilase, and Rulita shied away.
"Ouch! You did that on purpose."
"Yes, I did. If I weren't your brother, I'd kill you myself. That net was for a paying customer who wants his merchandise this afternoon." Erol grazed her skin again, leaving a tender pink burn in place of a cut.
"So? You shouldn't have made it single-use or I could have brought it back. I tried to pry the shanks out, but they're like fishhooks, for goddsake. Did you think of that while you were designing it, Erol? Fishhooks embedded in steel aren't very useful. Anyway, what's he going to do with it? Shaftjumping?" Anyone could do that. Hell, she did it a couple times a week.
"Yeah. Maybe. What's it to you? Not everyone wants to watch people die," Erol said.
"Shaftjumping is for children. It's like hitching on the back of a transport. It isn't even fun," she said.
"You do both," he reminded.
"For me, they're a means to an end," she said. "What I do is an art. No, it's more than art. It's journalism."
"You're sick, Lita, and so are your fans. DeathBlog has nothing to do with art or journalism. It's all about making money."
"Of course it's all about making money. It costs money to keep Mandy alive." Rulita's voice cracked, and she scowled, embarrassed at her own weakness. She observed death every day with the disinterest of a machine, but the thought of tiny Mandy's slow death in some researcher's lab brought tears to her eyes.
"You never asked Mandy if she wants to be kept alive," Erol accused.
"It wouldn't matter if I did ask. She can't answer." But someday the research money Rulita kept flowing to Pound Pharmaceuticals would pay off, and Mandy would awake from her coma, and they would be a family again. Mandy would thank her, would thank them both, though God knew Erol had been little enough help.
"Well, you never asked me," Erol said, his voice soft, resigned. "And she's my sister, too."
***
Rulita knew how it felt to die from a gunshot wound thinking about the three children who would never see you again. She knew the pain of dying with a knife blade sticking out of your back, wondering about the existence of God, the agony of a lower-body crush injury, major brain trauma, heart attack, loss of a limb. She could describe in detail what it was like to be paralyzed from the neck down, to feel the sudden loss of higher brain functions that declared the victory of a nervous system disease.
"You'd think all this knowledge of death would come in useful," she wrote in her private journal, the one she didn't even share with Erol. "You'd think I could use some of it to save Mandy."
Erol, inventor of the neurotap and splint, had thought so, too, at first. In a formal meeting with Pound's executive committee, he had actually managed to convince Pound President Grisham Lethby of its potential.
"With this tap, installed so," Erol indicated Rulita's neurosurgical computer model, "the patient's sensory perceptions can be accessed directly, all of them. Sight, sound, hearing, taste, and feeling!"
Dr. Lethby cleared his throat politely. "But sensory perception is an individual experience. The actual interpretation could never be accurate. Possibly it could not even be interpreted."
"That's what we thought, too," Erol said, including Rulita with a wave of his slender hand, "but we've tested it extensively. The splint provides a conduit between the brain of the person experiencing the perceptions and the brain of the person receiving the output. The receiver's brain acts as a translator."
The room was silent then, except for the vice president, who gave a disbelieving grunt.
Erol's lips formed the grim line that indicated his patience was waning. He touched his own head where the first tap had been installed. Mandy had been the second, followed by almost a dozen human volunteers who were familiar with Erol's brilliance and were willing to take the risk. "I have documented all of my tests, and I can reproduce the results."
"Exactly how does this... translation... work? Could you explain it to a panel of BMI experts?" The vice president asked.
"I'm not offering you the technology. I'm offering to use this technology to help with your research." Erol closed the model and tucked his professional-looking pocket projector into a ragged backpack.
"What is your proposal?" asked Dr. Lethby.
"My sister, Amanda, has been diagnosed with VLFS. I want you to divert some resources to a cure for that disease."
"Tarkus syndrome? That's insane!" the vice president said. "Why, there might be all of two thousand people across the world with clinical Tarkus, and another five thousand symptomatic, most of them in developing countries. You can't actually expect us to divert millions of dollars to an obvious waste of money. We would never recoup our investment, much less make a profit."
Dr. Lethby was more circumspect, quieting the VP's tirade with a hand. "Easy, now, Henry." To Erol, he said, "We are dreadfully sorry for your sister's illness, despite our young vice president's callous reaction. But we are a business, and must behave like one. A thorough cost analysis is required before we can make a decision of this magnitude. I hope you understand."
Erol nodded, his face pale. Rulita had expected Pound to take the offer, and obviously so had he. Sitting in the corner, wearing her reporter's façade, Rulita allowed the news to wash over her with apparent indifference. She made a little note in the corner of her mind: This is unfair, and they know it, the greedy bastards! Then she sat absolutely still, waiting for the group of researchers and administrators to stand, waiting for them to file out of the room and leave her and Erol alone.
"And you can have Mandy's body. Now. For your cosmetics testing only, I mean."
Rulita stood so fast her chair flipped and crashed into the wall. "Erol!"
The babble of speculations and promises that followed drowned out her weak protests. How many people would donate the living, if terminally ill, body of a relative to a drug company? No one. No one who wasn't completely desperate or out of their mind. That offer clinched the deal with Pound.
But the neurotap was not the boon they had supposed.
"It has proven useful in human subject testing when the subjects are very young, but otherwise, it's utility is marginal at best. We don't want to use the neurotap in our research. We want to buy it. We're prepared to make you a very fair offer," Dr. Lethby explained over dinner at Dimension, just a few weeks after the agreement was made. They had feasted on seafood and imported wine, and were laughing merrily at his jokes, which were not terribly funny.
Rulita, who had imagined this to be a celebration of the success of the tap, felt goosebumps prickling her entire body as the joy fell out of the night. Their plan was in a shambles again. Would they give Mandy back now, or had Erol donated their sister's body for nothing? What about the research Pound had done so far? Would it just end now?
More immediately, Erol had to be dragged off of Dr. Lethby, who straightened his tie and paid the bill with a shaky smile.
"Not necessary, but thank you. No harm done," he told the manager, who offered to call the police.
"I do not sell my inventions, Lita, you know that," Erol told her later.
"Maybe you should make this the exception," Rulita argued. "We are talking about our sister's life. That tap is worth a lot of money to someone. You don't have to sell it to Pound. Sell it to the highest bidder, and give the proceeds to Pound for VLFS research."
Erol just shook his head. "Profit from selling the tap wouldn't be enough to support research for a month. It could take years to find a cure."
She knew Erol was right. He was older than her by a decade, gray streaking the hair in his ponytail, and he had ably handled the family finances since their parents' death.
To the company's credit, Pound did return Mandy's body, along with all of her life support equipment. It sat in the middle of their family room and sang its electronic hum of death day after day, night after night, while Rulita held Mandy's bone-thin hand and wondered: What would it be like to be 12 years old, dying from a rare disease, unable to talk? Does she feel anything, anything at all? Or is this merely a slow and painless way to die?
Several times, she reached for the tap, thinking to explore Mandy's feelings, but always she drew her splinted hand back before the point of contact. It would be an invasion, something she could never do without her little sister's consent. Gradually, she began to see another use for the neurotap, something Erol would never allow... but she would do it anyway, for Mandy.
***
Rulita became a specialist in the experience of death, and her readers appreciated it. DeathBlog had won more spysite awards than any blog in the history of blogdom. Murderers begged her to cover their work. Wives of dying old rich men paid her to memorialize the death of their loved ones.
But her real fans, the ones who truly appreciated her work, had taps installed for the express purpose of giving her splint access, should she just happen to be there at the time of their deaths. Rulita did not steal the limelight from her subjects, but she enjoyed their adulation nonetheless.
The fat cop had arrested her once, charging her with 72 counts of accessory to murder. But DeathBlog's success in the user stats - and the money that came with it - did not diminish the fact that Rulita was a journalist, perhaps the last true beat reporter untouched by the long arm of the government. The judge had ordered her release within a few minutes of her arrest.
Next week, she was witnessing the judge's assisted suicide. Everyone wanted to be remembered. She was the bard singing the mass misérables of the times.
***
did u c the am ratings? <link>
The message from Contra had been sitting in Rulita's chat window for five hours, which meant the afternoon ratings were now out. Anything had to be better than yesterday when DeathBlog slipped two places behind PenalSex and that stupid game blog, TarZan. How long could you experience people swinging between walkways on bungee cords before you lost your lunch?
"Link," she said, and the ratings window popped out at her. DeathBlog had slipped another two places behind Contra's own site, FeetSmell, and something called Kukaw.
Contra: ru omigod can you believe it? feetsmell is no2
Rulita: luvli... whats kukaw?
Contra: sumkinda cooking thing... leeches, cats, human hair...
Rulita: readers are friggin fickle
Contra: dont worry tho... DeathBlog will comeback... always does
Not from fifth place. DeathBlog had never slipped four spots in three days. It had never been down one rank for longer than a ratecycle. Rulita stared at her monitor, pulled up her stats. Usage revenue had already dropped by 40 percent. Her stomach turned when she saw the meeting proposal from Pound's corporate development officer, Higgins. She moused over the "expand" icon twice before she trashed it without reading it.
Contra: hey?
Contra: maybe try sumthin different? torture or sumthin?
Torture? Good God, what kind of freak was this 'Contra'? Rulita was suddenly glad she'd never used visuals. She added Contra to her blocklist and turned to sulking.
***
Two days later, DeathBlog had fallen entirely off the charts, and Higgins called on Dr. Lethby's private iphone to let her know that the company's research into VLFS would cease within 10 days. She must have guessed that Rulita, who consistently ignored Higgins' messages, would respond more positively to Dr. Lethby.
Staring dully at Higgins' image, Rulita heard herself begging but felt powerless to stop it. "But Dr. Lethby said you were close, just another few weeks, maybe. Can't you spare just a few more weeks? Please? For the sake of my sister and the thousands of other people out there suffering from VLFS?"
The Pound rep had used the sim module to paste an alternate skin over her own features, turning herself into a 20-year-old blonde. Rulita wished she had learned more about sim-terference so she could give the woman a big fat pimple on the end of her perfect nose.
"I'm sorry, Rulita, we know how important this particular project is to you, but Pound has determined that the disease is too rare to prove worthy of self-funding in any traditional cost-benefit analysis," Higgins apologized. "We will, of course, return your sister's body. She remains comatose, but we believe our new anti-aging gel has significantly improved her skin tone." Her sim face appeared appropriately sympathetic for a few seconds before she went offline.
Current usage revenues might allow Rulita to live in a box under a bridge, but even if she stopped living completely for a few weeks and turned all her income over to Pound, the project could only be extended by a day or two. Besides, all the spysites were gossiping about Kukaw. It was as if DeathBlog didn't even exist any more, had never existed. It was falling down the search indexes faster than a tourist's camera off a walkway.
"What's wrong with people today? What do they want, anyway? Do I have to kill the subjects myself?" she asked Erol.
"Today? What's always wrong with them ever? Face it, you're not the newest thing any more," he said, setting aside a contraption that looked like a soup can with a stack of silicon wafers on top.
"But what am I going to do?" she asked.
"You mean besides following people around watching them die? Try something normal for a change. Work at a restaurant. Help out in the shop," he said. "You're good with computer models and simulations, better than me. I could really use your help refining the biomech interface for my prosthetic tail design."
Rulita stared aghast. Had he just said 'prosthetic tail'? "You mean you would just let Mandy die? After all we've been through? You'd just let those bastards at Pound get away with this?"
"DeathBlog is dead, Lita. It's time to go back to being a regular person. And maybe... maybe it's time for Mandy to die, too. You did your best, you can't do anything more."
Rulita walled her heart against the sympathy in his voice. He reached out his hand to comfort her, and she punched him in the chest with all her strength, rocking him backwards.
"DeathBlog is not dead! And I won't let Mandy die, either. I can do more, I can!" she screamed.
On her way out of the room, Rulita slammed the door so hard something fell off a high shelf and crashed on the floor, and Erol swore.
***
Contra: omigod did you see deathblog 2day?
Tech: wattaway 2 go =-0
Fangman: OD? Puleez. the guy with the ax in his head was better.
Tech: but the ax guy dint vomit
Fangman: Whats' so great about vomit?
Tech: its just xtreme thats all... if you dont like it your the only 1... deathblog is no1 again
Contra: 2day yeh but what now?
Tech: kukaws killr recipy for glass candy
Contra: i mean now that deathblog is ded? it was the best
Fangman: BackFromDeathBlog? LOL.
Chris Africa is a veteran writer and editor, with eight years' experience in Web site development. In November 2003, she founded Ultraverse e-zine of science fiction and fantasy. For more information about Chris Africa, browse her personal web site, Parola Scritta. Feel free to contact her at either of her e-mail addresses: baiewola@yahoo.com or editor@ultraverse.us
© Chris Africa
Ultraverse e-zine is Copyright 2003 Parola Scritta and Chris Africa.
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